Free Republic

KENNETT SQUARE, Pa. (AP) -- The cheerful sign outside Jane Cornell's summer school classroom in Pennsylvania's wealthiest county reads "Welcome" and "Bienvenidos" in polished handwriting. Inside, giggling grade-schoolers who mostly come from homes where Spanish is the primary language worked on storytelling with a tale about a crocodile going to the dentist. This poster and classroom at the Mary D. Lang Kindergarten Center are a subtle representation of America's changing school demographics. For the first time, U.S. public schools are projected to have more minority students than non-Hispanic whites, a shift largely fueled by growth in the number of Hispanic...

LITTLETON, Colo. - A longtime Littleton Public Schools teacher was arrested Friday, accused of sexual assault on a child by one in a a position of trust. Joel H. Fischer, a 45-year-old physical education teacher at Euclid Middle School since 2004, was booked at the Arapahoe County Detention Facility on a $200,000 bond.

EAST WINDSOR, NJ (CBS) – A 30-year-old middle school teacher has been arrested on attempted luring charges. Officials in Burlington County say the teacher, Patrick N. McGwier, taught the girl, who is now 15, when she was a student in eighth grade at Memorial Middle School in Willingboro.

I was in a government threat briefing recently and they brought up the "Sovreign Citizen" movement as a threat even before islamic extreamism. I had never heard of Sovreign Citizen, but I surely have heard and seen the destruction by islamic exremists. Am I missing something? Are these Sovreign Citizens just labels being tagged to TEA Party members? I am just suspicious that the greatest security threat in the USA is a group I have never heard of. Can anyone fill me in on this?

[Summary: Decline in American public schools is best explained by the far-left politics of our Education Establishment. These people prefer mediocrity.]-- Historically, Socialism and Communism were sometimes synonyms. But generally there was a sense that Socialism was softer. If you had enough power, you moved on to Communism, which was more coercive. One intellectual summed up the matter this way. Socialists persuade you with speeches. Communists persuade you with guns. In the days after the Russian Revolution, American leftists expended billions of hours trying to describe the perfect society. Fundamentally, all the debates turned on how much power the central...

Do the Colleges have anything to gain over Legalizing of lawbreaking aliens? Answer: Yes they do. Why is this? Well the answer is quite simple, if you take away the conventional entry level jobs away from the Youth in High School and College you make the supposed "need for college" almost mandatory. In the conventional sense a young adult growing up would have at least a summer job even in high school. Now some people would think this job would be useless in havin a career as a lawyer or doctor later on in life, however they would be wrong....

College campuses in America are frequently teeming with all manner of liberals and trustafarian socialists who drive Volvos . Some of these schools are worse than others. Some are just egregiously awful.Here, The Daily Caller presents the 2014 rankings for the most annoying, rabidly politically correct, dirty-hippie, tree-hugging colleges and universities across the fruited plain. You have been warned. Swarthmore College in the suburbs of Philadelphia is a leftist hothouse full of wealthy white kids. In February, Swarthmore sophomore Erin Ching criticized her school for allowing a conservative — Christian thinker Robert George — to speak on campus. “What really...

More Studies Show Children Are Wired for Religious Belief: A Brief Literature Review Casey Luskin August 7, 2014 4:07 AM | Permalink Back in April, David Klinghoffer noted a story in the Wall Street Journal about how Boston University psychologist Deborah Kelemen advocates "suppressing" belief in a "God-like designer" by trying "to get young children to understand the mechanism of natural selection before the alternative intentional-design theory had become too entrenched." What was intriguing was not just how evolutionary scientists are scrambling to indoctrinate children against perceiving intelligent design in nature, but also how children have an innate tendency to...

Entry-level work isn't what it used to be. Companies bruised by the recession have stayed lean by automating and outsourcing core functions while slashing training budgets and payrolls. But in an effort to cut costs, some companies also have cut entry-level jobs that serve as a crucial first step on the path to a professional career. And others have made the responsibilities for first-timers more sophisticated, raising the bar for new graduates, who are expected to arrive job-ready from day one. These developments may be making it more difficult for some young adults to gain a foothold in the labor...

When Ideology Trumps Science: Neil deGrasse Tyson and Cosmos on Global Warming Jay W. Richards August 6, 2014 1:15 PM | Permalink I finally had a chance to watch the twelfth, penultimate episode of Cosmos, "The World Set Free." I was out of the country in June when it originally aired, but since there's no doubt the series is headed into the schools and remains relevant, I'll take this opportunity to comment. The episode stands out from most previous installments. Just when we've grown accustomed to circuitous narrative threads with obscure segues from one topic to the next, we get...

<p>BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) — Syracuse University has claimed the title of nation’s top party school.</p> <p>The No. 1 ranking was revealed Monday by The Princeton Review based on a nationwide survey of 130,000 students.</p> <p>Syracuse’s student newspaper ranked second best among the 379 colleges surveyed, and its sports scene, rated third best, likely helped the party mood.</p>

A brief introduction to password hashing for the uninitiated -- and why you should never trust a site that emails your password back to you!

Lisa Mason had taken out close to $100,000 in student loans in order to pay for nursing school, and was making payments on the debt when she died. Steve Mason said he and his wife, who had co-signed the loans, were contacted immediately after his daughter’s death and were told they must start making payments. “We knew if she didn’t pay her debt we would be responsible by co-signing, but we didn’t know that if she died the debt would fall to us,” he said. Mason said his daughter’s debt has ballooned to $200,000 and the payments exceed $2,000 a...

If you suspect someone in your life is a narcissist, there may be an incredibly straightforward way to confirm your suspicions: Just ask them. New research suggests that simply asking narcissists to out themselves can be surprisingly effective. Specifically, researchers asked this question over a series of 11 studies: “To what extent do you agree with this statement: I am a narcissist.’” The participants — and there were about 2,200 of them in total — were told to answer on a scale of one to seven. As it turned out, their self-scoring results closely matched scores on the traditional method...

Some evidence to end the debate about size.

John Dewey is often blamed (by me and many others) for being the cause of the long, relentless decline in American public education. In fairness, he is only the famous face of a bigger story. In the early years of the 20th century, as the Victorian era moved toward the wasteland of World War I, anxiety and ferment rippled across America and Europe. Unions were rising; revolution was preached in every capital; assassinations were common. There was genuine fear that civilization would fly apart. Edward A. Ross, a sociologist, published an influential book in 1901: Social Control: a survey of...

Professor Philip Moriarty expresses his displeasure with oft-repeated belief that atoms do no physically touch each other.

The big business of education is forever altering the state university systems around the country. They have become vessels of profit and enrichment for some, and are steadily distancing themselves from the citizenry of the home state. Hiding behind diversity and internationalism, universities have moved to out of state students and ultimately the international student. Left out are the in-state students looking for a reasonable cost of a college education from their own state university. Why does college cost so much? Why does a professor who gave a lecture to a 200 seat hall ten years ago cost so much...

The race for life begins again. Video at link. With a survival rate (to adulthood) of way less than 1%, you have to admire their spunk.

GERVAIS, Ore. – Unhappy parents have forced an Oregon school board to re-think its plan to begin handing out condoms to students – sixth-graders on up – when school starts up again this fall. During a May meeting, school board members approved a plan in which trained teachers (presumably health teachers) would hand out prophylactics after first having “a discussion with the student,” StatesmanJournal.com reports. Some of those students could have been as young as 11 years old. But when parents and community members caught wind of the “condoms-upon-request” plan, they flooded a June board meeting to express their displeasure....